Example Of Webstore Components Research Paper

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The document details about starting an e-commerce online business. The name of the hypothetical site is YouSell.mybiz. ‘YouSell’ will be a C2C (Consumer to Consumer) business model where people are allowed to post their stuff that they want to sell to those interested in buying. In order to complete the site design below listed functionalities are to be developed, some of which will be done in-house while some will be outsourced to a third party Company.

Website Design: in-house

The website design will be created based on the online/transactional strategy that allows to create a website with an electronic catalog for users to list, browse, sell and purchase. Object Oriented Hypermedia Design Model (OOHDM) will be used for site creation (Schmid & Rossi, 2004).

Hosting: outsourced

The choice of Hosting provider will be GoDaddy.com
Creation of User Profiles and Customer Files: In-house
The development of the site will be in-house that includes the creation of customer profile templates, storing and holding of customer data and customer files over internal databases (Schmid & Rossi, 2004).

Dynamic and Updated Multimedia Catalog, a Fast Catalog Search Engine: in-house

A fast catalog is built using flat file technology systems like Solar and Lucene. The fast catalog would search site content in a fast way by creating tags on user search (Schmid & Rossi, 2004).

Shopping Cart: in-house

The content management will be done by using a content management system like OpenCart.
Credit Card Processing: in-house
The credit card processing will be done by integrating payment gateway of Paypal Standard.
Shipping and Tax Calculations: in-house
Shipping and tax calculation for invoicing and delivery will be built in as part of website code.
E-mail Notifications: in-house
An SMTP and IMAP server from MS Outlook will be used for email sending and receiving.
Usage Statistics: outsourced
Google Analytics will be used for understanding the website usage and performance analytics.
Sales and Inventory Reports: in-house
A daily report of sales and inventory will generate in HTML format and emailed to managers.
Customer Account Management: in-house
The customer account management will be done with integration to the database management system built upon Oracle 11g.
Customer Support (help menus, tutorials, FAQs, etc.): in-house
Customer support will be part of the website model, with a separate section for customer support in the main menu. FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) section for generic queries and tutorials for helping the users to post and sell products (Schmid & Rossi, 2004).

Servers and Power: outsourced

A dedicated server for the e-commerce site with 16 GB RAM, 1 TB Hard disk space, daily backup of data and mounted application and web servers for fast processing. A competent hardware vendor will manage and host the servers (Storey, Straub, Stewart, & Welke, 2000).

Password Protection: in-house

The access to the site will be password protected, and its management by the internal IT team.
Encrypted Order Processing: in-house
There will be SSL-based encryption for all processing of the orders.
Integration with Back-office Software: in-house
A fully functional back office system for payroll generation, backorder listing, inventory management and invoicing will be done by internal IT team with the main e-commerce website. The back-office integration would enable effective management of the customer and improved customer relationships (Payne & Frow, 2005).
Figure 1: Diagram of the hardware, software, network, and database components for YouSell.mybiz online website
The Figure 1, depicts a diagram of the interaction of hardware and software components that will be required for developing the YouSell.mybiz ecommerce website.

References

Schmid, H. A., & Rossi, G. (2004). Modeling and designing processes in e-commerce
applications. Internet Computing, IEEE, 8(1), 19-27.
Storey, V. C., Straub, D. W., Stewart, K. A., & Welke, R. J. (2000). A conceptual investigation
of the e-commerce industry. Communications of the ACM, 43(7), 117-123.
Payne, A., & Frow, P. (2005). A strategic framework for customer relationship management.